Obsessed With ‘Love Is Blind’? Thank This Reality-TV Producer - Vanity Fair

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The reality-TV producer is reinventing the unscripted business for the Netflix age with one simple promise: “We’re not making up stories.”

By Natalie Jarvey

March 29, 2023

“This is my favorite setup so far,” Chris Coelen says, guiding me through a soundstage some 30 miles north of Los Angeles. In just a few days, it’ll be filled with singles hoping to find love through a wall on Netflix’s compulsively watchable Love Is Blind. Coelen is the mad scientist behind this unconventional dating experiment, and he brims with a boyish first-day-of-camp excitement as he points out the unobtrusive camera setup in the “pods”—small, windowless rooms where participants will date one another sight unseen—and the catwalk where the couples who decide to get engaged after a shockingly short 10-day courtship will lay eyes on each other for the very first time.

Before the cameras start rolling, Coelen tells me, the set feels like a place where anything can happen. What almost certainly will happen is that when this season of Love Is Blind streams, it’ll be a hit. Since debuting in early 2020, the Nick and Vanessa Lachey–hosted show has become a phenomenon not seen since the launch of The Bachelor. Its first season vaulted into Netflix’s US top 10 and stayed there for 47 days straight, with everyone from Kim Kardashian to Chrissy Teigen tweeting about their new obsession. Subsequent seasons turned the unlucky-in-love Deepti Vempati into a role model for independent women and refashioned the Cutie orange into the most controversial fruit since Eve and her apple. A fourth season premiered Friday and had the biggest debut yet for the show; at least two more seasons are on the way. Netflix has also adapted the format internationally, including in Brazil and Japan.

“Love Is Blind is our MVP of unscripted formats,” says Brandon Riegg, the executive in charge of Netflix’s nonfiction originals. “You can’t overstate the impact that that show’s had…within Netflix and then, I’d say, on TV in general.”

Thanks to the success of the thrice-Emmy-nominated series, Coelen and his Kinetic Content now produce a constellation of relationship-driven reality shows for Netflix. According to Riegg, they’re the “biggest dating shows in the US on television right now”—though you’ll have to take his word for it, as Netflix’s viewership metrics are notoriously squishy. In The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, couples must confront whether they are ready for a commitment while fielding advances from new paramours. In Perfect Match, quasi celebrities from past seasons of Netflix reality shows mingle in the hopes of pairing off.

Love Is Blind creator Chris Coelen

By Charley Gallay/Getty Images.

Coelen, 54, knows that many people consider reality TV junk food in an era of Michelin-star scripted fare. “Most of the reality programming out there, it’s shit,” he acknowledges. “Most of it is schlock. It’s not well done. And that’s partly because people treat it like a fucking factory.” So what makes his reality threesome so undeniable?

“The kind of storytelling that we do on our shows is completely unique,” he says with an earnestness that belies the frothy fun of his shows. “We try to get very deep into people’s truths. We’re not shying away from a conversation about abortion”—one features heavily in Love Is Blind season three—“and also not pushing them to have that. It’s just trying to understand the layers of what makes those people human…. We’re not making up stories.”

Though the reality-television business as we know it is still a rather modern construct, most of the franchises that endure today are pushing middle age. Survivor is currently airing its 44th season, The Amazing Race will soon air its 35th, and more than 40 people have stepped into the role of either Bachelor or Bachelorette. So it wasn’t a guarantee that Netflix would be able to break through when it decided to expand into the genre just a few years after conquering prestige TV with House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.

One of the first people the streamer called was Coelen—a former reality-TV agent who repped everyone from Ryan Seacrest to Stan Lee before transitioning to producing. He pitched a few projects that Netflix passed on before Riegg mentioned that he was looking for a fresh take on a dating series. The idea that came to Coelen was for a show that stripped away the distractions of modern-day technology. “Obviously, there’s a lot of dating apps out there…but I just felt like maybe there was a different way to meet people,” Coelen says. “And I felt like something that was universal…is that everyone wants to be loved for who they are.”

From there, he came up with Love Is Blind’s catchy premise: that singles would “blind” date on opposite sides of a glowing blue wall. Then he raised the stakes: They would only be able to meet face-to-face after getting engaged. If both participants said yes, a wedding would take place just a few weeks later. “It might be the best pitch I’ve ever been a part of,” says Riegg, who nearly bought it in the room. The only question was: Would anyone actually get engaged?

Coelen, who previously adapted a hit Danish format to create Married at First Sight for American audiences, was confident that they would. He predicted at least five couples would leave the pods with plans to marry. Riegg thought he’d be lucky if he got even one.

It turns out they were both wrong. Eight couples on the first season of Love Is Blind got engaged, more than Netflix had budgeted for in terms of following the next stage of their journey. Two couples ultimately chose to walk down the aisle. They’re still together today.

Making reality-television magic involves a fair bit of luck, but the people I call to talk about Coelen attribute his success to preparation. “He’s obsessive in all the right ways,” says Rob Mills, who leads unscripted and alternative entertainment at Hulu and ABC, where Kinetic produces the competition series Claim to Fame. “Other people will sell a show, pass it off to their executives, and then kind of move on. Chris is there from the development stage to the pitch stage to everything we have to go through to get the show greenlit. And then he’s there on set every day, giving you reports.”

On Love Is Blind, Coelen regularly spends 12 hours on set, mostly sitting in the control room, where he can watch feeds from every single pod. Once filming ends, he will often personally dig through some 30,000 hours of raw footage. Nick Lachey tells me that Coelen’s devotion to his work comes through during filming, when he gives participants a pep talk at the start of each day in the pods. “You can’t help but feel his passion,” says Lachey, who also hosts The Ultimatum and Perfect Match. “He truly believes in love and in the power of a meaningful relationship, and I think he really, honestly, truly believes that that’s possible through this experience.”

I experience Coelen’s obsession firsthand when, a few days after our first meeting, he emails to let me know that Perfect Match has hit number one in the US for the first time. He’ll send several more messages in the weeks that follow, but it turns out he’s not keeping track of the ratings just for my benefit. “I’m a crazy person,” Coelen says. “I like to dig into all the facts and figures.” He explains that he’s kept a personal record of Netflix’s global top 10 list since the streamer began publishing that data in 2021, and based on his calculations, subscribers spent more than 550 million hours watching Kinetic programming last year.

“People talk about how to really run a restaurant successfully, you should have been the waiter, the busboy, the cook. I kind of feel like I’ve wanted to do that in making our shows,” Coelen adds. “Trying to learn every little bit of it has been fun for me.”

Aside from the family Tesla he parks outside the Love Is Blind set, there’s little about Coelen that screams Hollywood. With his loose-fitting T-shirts and hair gelled into short spikes, I get the impression he settled on a style that worked for him in the 1990s and never looked back.

That’s around when Massachusetts-raised Coelen first moved to Los Angeles. After a short-lived stint in TV news, he went to work as an assistant at the talent agency APA, where his new boss took one look at him and told him to get a haircut if he wanted to move up the ladder. “He was an ex-Marine,” Coelen says with a laugh. “I went and got my hair cut to probably about the length it is now, and he said, ‘That’s not short enough.’ I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t afford a second Supercuts haircut—I still go to Supercuts, you know—so I’m like, ‘Well, can I have 15 bucks?’”

Once his hair was deemed acceptable, it didn’t take long for Coelen to get promoted to agent. Instead of going after lucrative film and TV stars, Coelen focused on representing media personalities, including TV journalists and MTV VJs. In 1996 he was hired by rival agency UTA. When early reality juggernauts like Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire first began to take off, he pushed to start the agency’s alternative division.

Even as he rose through the ranks, Coelen often felt like a creative moonlighting as a dealmaker. When one of his top clients, Surreal Life cocreator Mark Cronin, fired him out of the blue—“Mark decided to call me up, and he’s like, ‘I’m turning 40 and I’m breaking up with my girlfriend and I’m firing my agent,’” Coelen remembers—he realized that perhaps it was time to move on. “You’re in the service industry, and you’re not really a part of making anything and you’re not a part of building anything,” he says. “That was not satisfying for me.” Coelen left UTA in 2006 to help client RDF Television—maker of Wife Swap, among other shows—launch in the US. Four years later, he struck out on his own with Kinetic.

The production shop’s early shows included ABC cooking competition The Taste and Betty White’s Off Their Rockers, but its first big success was Married at First Sight, in which participants agree to marry a complete stranger matched to them by relationship experts. It’s now airing its 16th season and has spawned multiple spin-offs. Today, Coelen estimates that he’s got around a dozen active projects at Kinetic, including The Ultimatum: Queer Love for Netflix and another season of Claim to Fame for ABC.

“Chris is the highest-quality producer in his genre,” says Peter Chernin, the veteran entertainment executive whose The North Road Company acquired the US assets of Kinetic’s parent company in a reported $200 million deal last summer. Though the purchase included several businesses, he tells Vanity Fair that Kinetic was by far the largest in terms of revenue and profit. Chernin expects that as streamers like Netflix rein in spending (and as Hollywood prepares for a potential writers strike later this year), cost-effective shows like the ones Kinetic produces will only become more valuable. “The price effectiveness of Love Is Blind and Ultimatum and Perfect Match is significantly greater than all but a handful of their scripted shows,” he says.

Back on the Love Is Blind set, Coelen tells me that even after years in the reality business, he still gets a thrill out of witnessing contestants trying to find love. Between Love Is Blind and Married at First Sight, the married father of four—he actually met his wife after they were set up on a blind date—has attended countless televised weddings over the years. “I really don’t have any vested interest in whether they say I do or I don’t,” he says. “Because if they have been authentic to the process and to themselves, then it will have been an amazingly compelling journey, and that’s all that matters.”

I search his face for any sign of cynicism, but it’s just not there. “I don’t ever want to be fucking preachy,” he adds. “But to be able to share these kinds of stories with the world, it’s really cool.”